It's not really the Auckland Tram anymore, is it ...

Late last week the government announced its new plan to spend billions of dollars on the light rail to Auckland airport it had promised to have completed by 2023. It wants to place nearly half underground. So as the UnCivil Servant points out in this Guest Post, it's not really a tram anymore ...

THE WORLD IS AWASH WITH with poorly thought-out light rail/tram proposals. Some even get implemented -- in places like Newcastle, Australia. Most generally prove to be eye-wateringly expensive money-pits that look nice in glossy renderings, and increase some property values for houses and apartments near stations, but have a negligible transport impact either on traffic congestion or emissions. Auckland's proposed underground light rail is one of these. 

Like most such projects, it is less about transport impacts or economics, and everything to do with ideologically-blinkered politicians ever keen to build monuments to themselves at the expense of our children and grandchildren. 

At least the proposal the Government has accepted, the Michael Wood Memorial Moneypit, is not the inanely stupid street-tram idea, so favoured by the Greens and urbanists, that would remove a great deal of existing road capacity -- that removal being a key reason that car-hating Greens and urbanists want trams so much: which is because they have worked out the main way to stop people driving is by making it much more difficult, expensive and inconvenient to do so, and putting a tram on the road a tram is among the best ways they can think of to make it more difficult, expensive and inconvenient. (It's irrelevant whether or not they or anyone else rides the tram, because its main purpose is not to move people about, but to block people moving about by car, taxi, or truck.)

So the proposal is not as bad as it could be. Indeed, it's even better than it sounds (who in their right mind would ever think of ordering up an underground tram to Mt Roskill?) It would be a piece of public transport that could actually travel quite fast, at least for the tunnelled segments -- but it's the cost to get those segments in which lies the catch: $15 billion!

$15 billion is an eye-watering amount of money. 

• $15 billion is three times the total budget to be spent on public transport by Waka Kotahi and all local authorities for the entire period of 2021-2024 across the entire country.(source NLTP 2021-2024) 
• $15 billion is nearly twice what is spent on transport by Waka Kotahi and all councils in a single year, that’s all road maintenance and construction, all bus and train subsidies, everything. 
• $15 billion is is 23x the cost of building Auckland's Harbour Bridge in today’s money (and don’t forget, Auckland Harbour Bridge was funded by borrowing, and then tolls that paid off the debt).

By comparison, the Waterview Tunnel on SH20 was only $1.7 billion. The sum of $15 billion (almost certainly a gross underestimate) will make even the outrageously wasteful City Rail Link (CRL) cost of around $4.5 billion look like an economical option.

Indeed, $15 billion makes this the most extensive transport project in the country’s history. (By comparison, $115 billion in today's money is what the New Zealand govt paid for the entirety of the Second World War!) Dreamed up on what seems the back of an ill-suited envelope by an ill-informed committee. It will lose money as well, as there is no way the fares collected will ever recover even half the costs of operating it.

IT WAS ORIGINALLY PROPOSED as a way to address two problems:

• demand exceeding capacity on bus routes along Dominion Road; and
• bus overcrowding in downtown Auckland.

It is a very expensive way to fix these two problems -- if indeed it ever will.

Conceived originally to fix these two problems, the "solution" has grown as inexorably as the ego of a newly-elected politician. Politicians love big, flash exciting mega-projects, and (combined with an almost fetishised ideological love-affair that urbanists and city planners have with trams), Auckland's light-rail "solution" has grown like moss, slowly absorbing and taking over more-and-more budget.

Just like the highway planners they criticise, the public transport-planners extrapolate growth in demand to be endless -- so they think they need to plan for ever-expanding capacity for their preferred transport mode. The time and willingness people have to travel within cities however is not endless and, as the pandemic has demonstrated, there is not endless demand for bus trips on this corridor. 

Indeed, there are far more cost-effective ways to increase bus capacity, such as 

• more extensive bus priority lanes and priority at traffic lights 
• pricing peak-time bus travel so that there is actually net revenue from a highly-used service that can be used to pay for more capacity. 

Furthermore, the downtown Auckland bus-overcrowding issue seems to have largely disappeared, in part because there is so much roadspace taken up by building CRL, and in part because Auckland Council has been removing cars and drivers from more and more streetspace by making driving difficult in its own way, such that this simply isn’t an issue anymore (and it isn’t an issue anyway, as trams' capacity on streets is only marginally more than having multiple buses).

I'VE REFERRED TO IT before as the Auckland Tram, but the tunnelled, grade-separated version proposed by Grant Robertson and Michael Wood (and paid for your children and grand-children) really is “light rail”; it is what in Brussels is called “Pre-Metro” -- a scaled-down metro train that doesn’t resemble the slow trams seen in Melbourne and Sydney so much as an underground-lite. This annoys the Green Party supporting urbanists who WANT slow trams to get in the way of cars, but it should annoy everyone who thinks $15 billion can be better spent elsewhere.

So what will it do? The Government press release is informative in what it doesn't say as much as what it does. Significantly for example, it doesn’t mention the cost.

Here's what it does mention:

• Auckland’s growing population will mean they need some way to get around ...  a lot of them, apparently, from the apartments along Sandringham Rd or in Onehunga or Mangere Bridge whose residents will want to travel to the CBD, or the airport, or places in between 
• without this light metro, Auckland will be gridlocked ... even though there is nowhere in the world in which building a light metro line has relieved gridlock; it might take a few buses off Sandringham Road and Dominion Road, but that’s it
• 12,000 cars will be taken off the road ... but where and over what period? total cars in a day, on what roads? Some short sections of motorway have over 100,000 vehicles a day passing over; around 35 million vehicle-kilometres are travelled on an average (pre-pandemic) day by motor vehicle on Auckland’s roads -- so at best this $15 billion boondoggle will reduce traffic by just  0.03% 
• 97,000 new jobs will be created by 2051... by whom? how? Not from the construction or operation of the light metro. Does that take into account the higher taxes on properties along the route? Would the jobs have been created anyway? We are left to guess.
• it will halve travel time for SOME people to and from the airport ... it doesn't say who those people are -- and, frankly, unless you live next to a station on the route, particularly at the southern end, it wont be fast because it will stop many, many times before arriving at your destination

So that's what it says on the tin. Here are some information we're left to work out for ourselves:

• the capital cost or the annual subsidy needed, compared to how much subsidy current services need to keep running
• expected demand, and the proportion of light metro capacity expecting to be utilised at peak (and off-peak times)
• where the people living along the light metro line are expected to be working, or getting educated? (only 1 in 8 jobs in Auckland is in the CBD, and if you add the airport and Mangere, then the line serves only 1 in 7 potential jobs of people who live along it)
• the actual travel-time impacts on existing road traffic, including freight.
• why it isn't connecting either to Britomart, or to the new and also-very-expensice underground train set whose construction is currently disrupting much of the inner-city's life?
• why the Government is proposing light-rail through a tunnel to the North Shore now, instead of heavy rail connecting it to the City Rail Link under construction, so that people from the North Shore might get a train to say Newmarket, Henderson, new Lynn, Sylvia Park, Manukau, Papakura, or Onehunga -- instead of a light metro to that place on almost nobody's list of preferred destinations: Mt Roskill.

Perhaps a clue to that last question is that the chosen route puts it in the electorates of both the Minister of Transport and the Prime Minister ... which we're sure can only be an enormous coincidence.

What’s pretty clear is that this is a huuuge project, with a very long lead time, poorly thought through, that will in no way be even begun in the next two years. Not a chance. So there's still time to get back to problem definition and analysis... What’s the project trying to do? Which people is is trying to move? Do you want value of money, or a sea of big-spending Keynesian helicopter money? Does the city really need another multi-billion dollar monument? 

Even supporters of public transport are left wondering what's going on here. Imagine, for example, if even a tenth of the budget proposed here was spent on upgrading bus services in Auckland! But, of course, that wouldn't proved any sort of ribbon-cutting moment for a politician would it.